In the project “Predicting the impact of drought and increased temperatures on boreal forest ecosystems in Norway” (PREDICT), we are going to find out how the Norwegian spruce responds to climate change. We will do this through a large national network of meters that monitor the trees’ health online.

Background

Climate change can pose major challenges for Norwegian forests. The boreal zone is warming twice as fast as the global average. We know little about how our forests will respond to these changes.

On the one hand, rising temperatures and a longer growing season will probably stimulate increased growth and productivity. On the other hand, a more variable climate will entail extreme periods of drought, late spring frosts, heat waves and pathogens. What will be the total?

Photo: Line Nybakken

About the project

The overall aim of the PREDICT project is to find what happens inside the trees as weather and climate change.

Surveillance networks
We will establish a modern, long-term forest monitoring and research network on spruce forests in Norway. We will attach dendrometers to trees all over the country. A dendrometer is a measuring device that is fixed around the tree and measures the small changes in the diameter of the tree trunk as water availability, the condition of the tree, the weather, and other factors change throughout the day and season. The network will cover all the climatic gradients where Norway spruce grows. We will also collaborate with other similar networks elsewhere in the Nordics and Europe.

Connecting surveillance and digital monitoring
The knowledge about the individual tree’s health will be transferred to the entire landscape via advanced digital monitoring methods. The large datasets from the project, together with mapping data from drones and satellites, will enable us to create tools that automatically interpret changes in the spruce’s health. The result is a near-real-time insight into what is happening in the forest.

Availiability to the general public
The information from the project will be made publicly available, and will be particularly useful for researchers, forest managers and other decision-makers. The aim is, among other things, to create a website where the user can navigate on a map, and follow the spruce’s growth and water intake “minute by minute”. In the short term, this can be useful, for example, to predict where there is a risk of bark beetle attack or where it is necessary to thin to give more water to remaining trees. In the longer term, it will teach us in which areas the trees cope well even in dry periods, or if the forest owner should invest in tree species that tolerate water shortages better.

PREDICT is a three-year project, for the period 2024–2027, funded by the Research Council of Norway (NFR).